The more deeply scholars probe the evolution of management methods and structure, the earlier are antecedents of modern practice detected. The 1882 report on the Pennsylvania Railroad organization exhibits a highly refined conceptualization of big business administration and must stand as a significant milepost in the history of management. Here are to be found many of the ideas and even some of the terminology to which much more recent birth dates have hitherto been ascribed.

The following article appeared in the March, 1961, issue of the Weltwirt-Schaftliche Archiv, published since 1913 by the Institut für Weltwirt-Schaft an der Universität Kiel. Because of the pertinence and broad interest of the study, publication in America seemed highly desirable. Reproduction rights were graciously extended by Dr. Anton Zottmann, editor of the Archiv, and by the authors. The article is printed here directly from galley proof supplied by the Archiv. Commentaries by American scholars will be published in a subsequent issue of the Business History Review.

A comparative examination of late nineteenth-century worker productivity, machine utilization, and management methodology reveals the importance of process-oriented organization in American factories, where the highest technical skills were directed not at making products, as in Europe, but at making production lines. This orientation, together with a rapidly changing environment, required a particular kind of management and a new awareness of the management function.

Despite a widely prevailing judicial insensitivity to corporate reform and regulation, the large insurance companies found themselves under careful, constant, and not always sympathetic legal scrutiny. This scrutiny tended to emphasize the equity rather than the letter of the law, and kept the insurance contract the flexible servant of a dynamic society and industry.

The object of this paper is to give some facts in connection with the development of the organization of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, to show how and by what steps this organization became what it is, and, so far as may be, why these successive steps in the development were taken.

This cross-sectional study of small business tests conventional assumptions regarding backgrounds, motivation, characteristics, function, risks, and longevity, proving many of those assumptions to be imprecise or false. Quantification in historical depth reveals definite patterns both of fixity and change.

Concluding his sophisticated analysis of the Pennsylvania Railroad's organizational structure (cf. BUSINESS HISTORY REVIEW, Summer, 1961), the anonymous reporter for the RAILROAD GAZETTE described in a supplementary article, reproduced here following Professor Jenks' interpretative comments, the decentralized management of the Pennsylvania's western divisions.

As the oil industry grew, comfortable family firms, hitherto untouched by the ferocities of competition, found their position under attack and their independence menaced. The painful, inexorable process of substituting a new economic order for an old is here detailed from the viewpoint and records of one of the dispossessed.

Chicago's traction king was a master of corruption and financial legerdemain, but his contempt for public opinion proved at last to be his undoing. Out of such flamboyant transgressions great reform movements grew, and the character of all big business operators was made suspect.

In the intellectual career of one precocious scholar may be traced the course of jurisprudence and philosophy that joined law with economics, dealt with the fundamental problem of democratic restraints upon corporate power, and influenced in basic ways the direction of the New Deal program.

This searching probe goes beneath the common generalizations about integration to reveal in detail the causes, techniques, and results, not only as they relate to costs but also to problems of competitive strategy and over-all administration.

The Nebraska public-power paradox is more than a case study of the elimination of private enterprise. It illustrates how, in a seemingly homogeneous economic setting, familiar social, political, economic, and geographic factors can blend uniquely to produce a nonconformist entity, explicable only in terms of its history.

Harnessing the Niagara for large-scale commercial power exploitation was an entrepreneurial feat of major dimensions. The project also demonstrated the successful application of science to an economic problem. American investors proudly declined European financial assistance, but only too willingly solicited the advice of Europe's leading engineers.

The property bank, an ingenious new institution that provided badly needed capital for southern mercantile and agricultural operations, appears to have been the creation of one man's imagination. It is ironical that he died in financial embarrassment, leaving behind few clues for the curious historian.

The Spiegel venture into mail-order installment credit marketing is examined here in detail to illustrate application of the tools of economic analysis to a specific historical situation. Whether through chance or intuition, the innovator in this example, though lacking virtually all the pertinent data, made precisely the adaptation that hindsight analysis discloses to have been most likely to succeed.

A perception of the importance of measuring overhead costs led Church to analyze the totality of management. Among the first to formulate a comprehensive theory, he studied management in historical depth and defined it as a distinct function with identifiable components that could be manipulated in the interest of greater efficiency.

China's Imperial Canal excited the imagination of a succession of travelers. While American and British canal promoters were interested in the technological details, the true importance of the Chinese precedent lay in the breadth of concept — a gigantic, state-supported geophysical manipulation in the interests of interregional trade.

If an “index of continuity” for business enterprise could be constructed, it would show a distinct rise over the years. Reasons for and significance of this trend are examined, and distinctive mortality rates in various kinds of enterprises are identified. Appropriate data, however, have only recently begun to be recorded. With a sound statistical base, some form of enterprise life insurance may be possible; indeed, certain starts have already been made in this direction.

Dominance of the American blanket trade was obtained and held for half a century through a combination of aggressive marketing, progressive manufacturing methods, and far-sighted administration of a business beset by constant difficulties, part of which were peculiar to the times; part familiar to business in every age and circumstance.

The effort to establish a cotton factory in South Carolina in 1808 was aborted by inexperience, lack of capital, and unfavorable economic circumstance, but the episode provides a few more bits of evidence to add to the fragmentary history of early textile manufacturing in America.